Halleck's New English Literature eBook

[Footnote 16: The lease of the building for the
first Blackfriars Theater, on Ludgate Hill, London,
was taken in 1576 by Richard Farrant, master of the
boys of Windsor Chapel, and canceled in 1584.
In 1595 James Burbage bought a building for the second
Blackfriars Theater, near the site of the first.
This was a private theater, competing with the Globe,
with which Shakespeare was connected. The chief
dramatists for the second Blackfriars were Ben Jonson,
George Chapman, and John Marston. James I. suppressed
the second Blackfriars in 1608 because its actors
satirized him and the French king. A few months
later, Shakespeare and his associates assumed the management
of the Blackfriars and gave performances there as
well as at the Globe.

These facts explain Wallace’s discovery that
Shakespeare at the time of his death owned a one-seventh
interest in the second Blackfriars, a theater that
had formerly been a rival to the Globe.]

[Footnote 17: Dr. Faustus, Scene 6.]

[Footnote 18: Tamburlaine, Act II., Scene
7.]

[Footnote 19: The Winter’s Tale,
Act IV., Scene 4.]

[Footnote 20: Tradition says that Shakespeare
occupied the desk in the farthest corner.]

[Footnote 22: The contract price for building
the Fortune Theater was L440.]

[Footnote 23: Adapted from Furnivall.]

[Footnote 24: Entered one year before at Stationers’
Hall.]

[Footnote 25: May be looked on as fairly certain.]

[Footnote 26: Henry V., Act II., Scene
3, line 10.]

[Footnote 27: Bradley’s Shakespearean
Tragedy, p. 327.]

[Footnote 28: The Tempest, Act V., Scene
1.]

[Footnote 29: Ibid., Act I., Scene 2.]

[Footnote 30: For a list of books of selections
from the drama, see p. 216.]

[Footnote 31: For full titles, see p. 6.]

[Footnote 32: For full titles of books of dramatic
selections, see the preceding paragraph.]

CHAPTER V: THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660

History of the Period.—­James I. (1603-1625),
son of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and the first
of the Stuart line to reign in England, succeeded
Elizabeth. His stubbornness and folly not only
ended the intense patriotic feeling of the previous
reign, but laid the foundation for the deadly conflict
that resulted. In fifty-four years after the
defeat of the Armada, England was plunged into civil
war.

The guiding belief of James I. was that kings governed
by divine right, that they received from the Deity
a title of which no one could lawfully deprive them,
no matter how outrageously they ruled, and that they
were not in any way responsible to Parliament or to
the people. In acting on this belief, he first
trampled on the religious liberty of his subjects.
He drove from their churches hundreds of clergymen
who would not take oath that they believed that the
prayer book of the Church of England agreed in every
way with the Bible. He boasted that he
would “harry out of the kingdom” those
who would not conform.